You’re a Mean One, Mrs. Grinch
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 24
The only thing Jesse wanted for Christmas was a nude photo of Sasha as the Grinch, so Sasha was writhing in a virtual thatch of green fur generated by her iPhone, naked in an empty claw-foot bathtub, her right thumb hovering at the ready over the camera button and her back arching pornographically, her left calf draped over the edge of the tub and her right toe crooked skyward with balletic aspiration. She was a busty Jewess masquerading as a lissome green creature, which was probably why she couldn’t get the picture right, no matter how artfully she twisted. When her face looked hot, her tits came out lumpy, and when her body looked acceptably supple, the filter distorted her facial features into a mess of plush green fur and digitized eyelashes.
It was thankless work. Sasha grunted in frustration each time another terrible photo appeared in her camera roll. But she contorted anew, refocused the phone on her face (now visibly strained with determination), and humbled herself before the technology of the day—which everyone else used for purposes mundane and mercenary, but which Sasha was using for the highest purpose: that of seduction. The Grinch filter jumped to life in holographic patches.
Sasha and her iPhone wrestled for control of the image. Cotton-candy plumes of lime-green hair haloed her pink cheeks, swaying as she twisted her neck. Her nose blunted into an Anglo-Saxon snub dyed a shade deeper than the rest of her silky swirls of facial fur. It was the kind of nose she’d so often wished for growing up, but she saw now that it was all wrong on her face—a snub nose made her look asshole-ish, elitist. Glittering, bitter emerald irises ringed beefed-up black pupils, darting furtively in a milky bath of computer-generated sclera. Tangled green bushes replaced Sasha’s own dutifully threaded eyebrows. She smiled to reveal long, mossy teeth.
Besides the buttery eyelashes fanning the cartoon-princess eyes, it would be crazy to call this monstrous face “feminine.” But somehow the effect was beautiful in its hallucinatory sway. It produced an image that was visionary rather than literal, a trancey interpretation of what “woman” might mean in a blurry sense. Mediated by the Grinch filter, Sasha’s face was steely, its aspirational wickedness intercepting a darling, doe-eyed innocence. She pursed her scaly lips, cocked her furry jaw.
She looked really hot. It made sense that Jesse was horny for the Grinch. She—the Grinch—was a villain, a minx. The story of the Grinch was ultimately the tale of a cunt with a growth mindset. It was the story of a heart that could—and would!—swell to three times its size by the story’s end. Jesse was horny for the Grinch’s bitchiness, but also horny for the Grinch’s redemption. Yes, her boyfriend was horny for the Grinch’s peregrination.
She typed the words come back to me in white font, massaged the text down to its tiniest possible size, and implanted it, subliminally, in the gleam of the Grinch’s pupil. I want to be better for you, pleaded the big emerald eye. Inspired by her own virtue, Sasha contorted herself into the acrobatic shape of an exotic frog, making sure her ankles—her two best features—glistened daintily.
The bathroom was flooded with the soft light of a custom-made feat of industrial lamp design. Gays hated overhead lighting; Jules, their host and the house’s owner, had let the original ceiling fixture dust over, taped down the light switches. It was certainly possible that under fluorescent bulbs, the green of Sasha’s fur would not have shimmered so.
Jesse’s interest in the Grinch had something to do with the color green. Jesse had recently given her a green-and-pink Vivienne Westwood orb necklace for their one-year anniversary, along with a limited-edition Kylie Jenner eyeliner (called “Kyliner” and accompanied by a glossy note from Kylie herself) in Grinch green. All of the kitchen tools back in Jesse’s Brooklyn apartment were green: cheese grater, knife, teakettle. Most of the furniture, too, including a Realtree camouflage love seat that Jesse had upholstered that fall. Green succulents on the coffee table and a huge metal cactus with prickles to hang their keys and Sasha’s headscarves. Green bottles of vermouth on the bar cart and green-and-white vintage YSL towels in the bathroom, which Jesse had got from working on a set. And, for the holidays, three tiny green stockings on the defunct fireplace, each embroidered in Jesse’s hand with a different initial: S. for Sasha, J. for Jesse, and V. for Vivienne, Sasha’s black pug. And Sasha always wore a bootleg green Chanel ribbon around her neck or in her hair, its tendrils curling around her shoulders or between her collarbones. Today the ribbon sat in a loose knot around her neck. On her phone screen, the ribbon flashed in and out of the frame, the filter unsure how to Grinchify it.
Sasha stretched out her legs and arms in the bathtub and let her phone rest on her stomach. Vivienne, who had been sleeping on the plush bath mat, lifted her head to lick Sasha’s dangling wrist, and Sasha massaged Vivienne’s shiny forehead. The blood rushed through her vascular highway, her heart pounding out an uncertain rhythm. She put one leg on either side of the tub, like the woman in her favorite birthing video. This was unsexy of her, to flash herself at the ceiling. But her Grinch face had unlocked a feral rush. She imagined eleven tiny green pups suckling at her green teats while Jesse waited anxiously at her side, peering from time to time to see if a tendriled green head was emerging yet from her furry green crotch.
Jesse was in the bedroom next door to the bathroom, on the phone with Faye the psychotherapist. Though it was their first afternoon in Hudson, and technically they were on vacation, Jesse had forgotten to cancel before Faye’s forty-eight-hour cancellation window, so she’d excused herself from the rest of the group for the fifty-minute phone session to avoid paying Faye’s cancellation fee. Sasha’s phone read 3:23, meaning that half an hour of Jesse’s therapeutic hour remained.
She aimed the phone at her tits with newfound motivation. The filter’s touch was less artistic with the body than it had been with the face. The color it cast over Sasha’s flesh was nauseating, the nipples sprouting pathetic tufts of kelly-green fur. Jesse would think bristly nipples were hot, so she snapped a half-hearted picture, but the image on the screen horrified her, and she deleted it quickly.
As she contemplated her next pose, she realized that she could hear scraps of dialogue from Jesse’s therapy session in the bedroom next door. Actually, once she really began to pay attention, she heard Jesse’s voice on the other side of the wall ringing with sharp clarity, her words crystallized in such a way that attentive listening became unnecessary.
Sasha placed her phone facedown on the edge of the tub and sat up very slightly, her tailbone pressed to the ceramic basin like an ear to a door. Stock-still, she brought a hand up to her face, caressing her cheek, which sizzled as she listened. Jesse was slandering her!
“Sasha says she was put on this earth to be kissed, cuddled, fucked, admired, adored,” Jesse was telling Faye. “But all she does is take my love and affection; she never gives it back to me.”
Jesse then alleged to Faye that since Halloween, Sasha had been consistently cold to her, that Sasha’s gaze was totally devoid of care. In Jesse’s estimation, Sasha struggled to show love regardless, but since Halloween, Sasha had become exasperated and irritable, snippy and impatient.
“Sasha flinches when I try to kiss her,” Jesse was saying. “Like I’m a pervert. Is it stupid that I love her? Is it stupid that I love someone who makes me feel like that? It feels pathological, to be this pathetic dope who keeps loving someone who flinches away from me.”
A small, shocked laugh rose in Sasha’s throat. Jesse wasn’t speaking with malice. There was no performative gloss to these statements, the way there would have been if Sasha were talking to her own therapist. Jesse sounded sad and guileless, and was documenting for Faye the shape and size of that sadness.
Libel! Sasha thought. Though she wasn’t actually sure where the lie lay, Jesse tended to speak with an assumed neutrality that cloaked her own bias. Of course Jesse’s charges lacked context, a bigger picture—they lacked Sasha’s side of things.
There was a pause, Faye’s turn to speak to Jesse through a pair of wire headphones.
Jesse took a deep, raggedy inhale. “How does it feel in my body?”
Sasha imagined Jesse’s body scan. Jesse’s lungs were unclogged, unburdened by the confession. Her heart bursting with righteousness, her sturdy quads twitching against her track pants with the inertia of Faye’s affirmation. Her gut whirling, as usual, with anxiety. Sasha welled with guilt and grief. She pictured Jesse’s colon clamped and twisted like a crushed plastic bottle. Poor thing—it was easy to feel sympathy for Jesse’s colon.
Sasha stared down at her naked body. Her stomach bunched into two thin and discrete rolls of fat, one just under her ribs and the other above her crotch. She pinched them together like lips. Fuck this, the lips said. She tried to force the two rolls of fat into one unified stomach pouch, but a faint line remained where the skin had become accustomed to bunching when she sat. She grasped at her flesh until the skin began to tenderize.She pressed her boobs together to make a cushioned plate of armor on top of her racing heart.
“It feels like I’m starving for love, and she’s feasting on it,” Jesse continued. “She’s a glutton, and she gives so little—she withholds it from me because she can tell how bad I need it. She’s punishing me.”
Sasha bristled at glutton. But she did know what Jesse was talking about, as far as the flinching was concerned.
A few weeks before, on hiatus from her literature PhD program in Rhode Island and back in Brooklyn for Thanksgiving, Sasha had been standing at the stove in Jesse’s apartment, making rice. Jesse had come up behind her and grabbed her around the waist. For the first thirty seconds of the embrace, Sasha was grateful for the touch, which meant that Jesse still wanted her. (Delusional, Jesse would have argued here, because she’d never stopped wanting Sasha.) But then the feeling of Jesse’s hands was off-putting, too tight, like a sports bra. She felt bloated and repulsive. She shook the hands off her, writhing away from Jesse’s grasp and grabbing both of Jesse’s wrists tightly in her fists, saying only that she didn’t want to burn the rice.
Jesse had looked wounded, hands hanging limp in the air. Sasha felt guilty, so she released him. Instantly, the hug was not what she wanted—it was too desperate, too gratifying for Jesse. Jesse had flooded the hug with significance that Sasha hadn’t intended; the hug was beginning to make promises that she couldn’t keep—nightly hand jobs, a shared bank account, unilateral exoneration. As soon as Jesse began to caress her ass and nip at her neck like a happy puppy, Sasha reverted to her closed-off, looking-away thing. Jesse hated this more than anything else. Sasha made her body go slack and unresponsive and willed Jesse to notice, to attend to the difference, but he did not. Jesse was too hungry for Sasha to notice that the thing he wanted had disappeared. Her heart was pounding like a bloody dolphin heart. Jesse’s mouth was on hers, fruity and metallic. His body tight against hers, firm bound chest pressed to her. She almost gagged on the tongue. She focused somewhere behind Jesse’s head and counted to twenty. She understood that she had already ruined everything. All there was left to do now was let out a few groans, maybe a couple of soft yelps. Jesse snaked a strong, eager hand into her underwear, and she knew that she was closed, a tight, wet spiral clenched shut. When Jesse pressed on down eagerly, like her kittycat was a buzzer at an apartment building aglow with a hot party, Sasha let out a quick, involuntary growl.
What had come to her mind was literally that line from Barthes: Does it still count as sex if someone dies?
But she had not died, not yet, and as soon as Jesse announced, “You’re closed, baby, open up,” she knew he was going to coax her open. It was demoralizing to be loved so much when you were so mean. She focused on loosening.
“Come on,” Jesse urged. “Can I come inside?”
“No,” Sasha said weakly.
Concentrating hard, the rice bubbling on the stove and frothing onto the burners, Sasha relaxed her muscles until Jesse was able to slip a finger inside of her, and then another finger, until she was truly being fucked. Jesse’s fingers slithered inside her with greater force, a hangnail battering her G-spot.
Aww, she’d thought, Jesse. A sweetie, someone who loved her, someone she loved back. She didn’t have to reject this love or be so suspicious. She felt herself soften. She made the noises she knew Jesse liked, some benevolent mews. But the truth was that she liked pretending, it was what she had always done, crying out and letting her breath suck in and out of her in short, raspy puffs until Jesse believed he had made her come; she could even tremble her legs in mockery of coming, relax her whole body as though with relief. She couldn’t believe that some straight girls made such a big deal about never faking it, like faking it was anti-feminist. Faking it was easy and fun. She sighed cutely into Jesse’s sweaty hairline for good measure.
* * *
Sasha liked her body better upright. Her stomach was not flat, admittedly, but standing up, it could be believed that she had once possessed abs, and had only very recently lost them. Standing, she could focus on a few key features that she didn’t mind: visible kneecaps, tits jammed into attention in a 32F bra, manicured fingernails—black gel acrylics this season, coffin shape—with well-tended cuticles. Standing, she could imagine that she was Jessica Rabbit, breasts heaving against a pale pink twin-set and a miniskirt cinching a twenty-inch waist, creamy arms hinging at lethally sharp elbows. Lying down, as she was in the tub, she felt like a fleshy skirt—her tits pooling at her sides like melting heaps of buttercream frosting.
“Maybe I can explain it like this,” Jesse was telling Faye. “I was walking with Lou a couple weeks ago, and they were saying something about how being the lovesick dopey guy is fun, for a while. Y’know, the chase. But what’s more fun is being lusted after. Lou wants to make someone else feel desired, sure, but they also want to be the person someone else, like, sacrifices their pride to pursue.”
Sasha’s constricted throat let out an ugly hack. Was Jesse implying that Sasha didn’t lust after him? What Jesse didn’t seem to understand was that his desire to play captive, doghouse husband, and Sasha’s desire to play queen—each committing to the game until there was a chance of a winner and a loser, then upsetting the balance before there could actually be one—was a bond reliant on both of their participation. Without it, one of them would always be marooned, a pathetic dope.
Jesse told Faye that he’d asked Lou if their new girlfriend, Darcy, was that person for them—someone who made them feel as desired as they made her feel. Without hesitating Lou had said yeah, of course she was. Jesse reported to Faye, voice breaking, that upon hearing Lou’s answer, he’d felt almost envious.
A violent, sour swirl of rage gathered in Sasha’s abdomen at the annoying hiss of Darcy’s name. Darcy and Lou were not yet in Hudson, but suddenly she could feel them leering at her from behind the plush cotton towel hanging on the opposite wall. She collected her body into a ball and rocked back and forth, a restless catatonia grinding her vertebrae like bulbs of garlic.
Jesse was, now doing some sort of guided meditation with Faye, lost in a reverie about the early days of his and Sasha’s relationship. How Sasha would scratch Jesse’s whole body with her long nails until Jesse came from pure anticipation. How Sasha bought a nursing corset whose cups unhooked to reveal her creamy tits, hanging like storm clouds from which Jesse could suckle fresh raindrops. How Sasha would leave sweet notes and weird gifts—a Skittles brand candle, a tiny taxidermy mouse, an iridescent button—when she’d left Jesse’s apartment at dawn, which was what she thought girls were supposed to do.
Now Sasha was intent on punishing Jesse for something that Jesse hadn’t even done. Sasha’s delusion, Jesse called it. Her fantasy.
Sasha felt, for a moment, dizzy. Then, just as quickly, the anger deflated like a broken blister, leaving her flapping open, waterlogged and bilious. A spasm of sorrow. Her tailbone ached against the porcelain tub. She bit down hard on the inside of her cheek, loosing a hunk of flesh that she swallowed unceremoniously. She clutched at the porcelain walls of the bathtub. No, she thought, no, no, no, this isn’t happening, it can’t be happening. I cannot have let things get this bad. As much as she hated Jesse in that moment, she hated herself more for prompting this bitter version of him. She’d defeated him, emasculated him.
She was willing to believe the worst about herself—eager, even, to do so, lapping up the insults like a thirsty dog. Hearing the vilest things about herself satisfied the evil part of her that ached for recognition. She could have climbed out of the tub and scrambled downstairs to safety, she knew. The problem was that now, as always, she didn’t want to stop listening.
Things were wrapping up. The following week’s appointment was being confirmed, the final affirmations stated, Jesse reminding Faye that they’d be in Hudson for another week, guests of Jules and Miranda, before returning to Brooklyn. Sasha hurled her phone down on the shag bath mat and pulled on her underwear, dressing quickly in an oversized pink satin dress and black tights.
* * *
In the kitchen, their queer elders bent around the wood-topped island like members of a summit, both pitched forward on their elbows. Jules Todd, prime-time news anchor for the liberal channel, scribbled on a legal pad. Vivienne sat heavily at the feet of Miranda Saraf, a licensed social worker and Jules’s partner of five years.
“Mommy is your world,” Sasha reminded Vivienne softly, bending to bury her face in Vivienne’s neck scruff. She didn’t use baby talk with Vivienne; this would degrade them both.
“She’s so perfect,” Miranda sighed, reaching out to massage Vivienne’s velvety ears.
Vivienne lapped gratefully at Miranda’s right eye.
It was well documented in human-interest profiles about Jules that she preferred male dogs to bitches and, though she was in between dogs right now, had a propensity for bigger breeds like sheepdogs. Regardless, both Jules and Miranda had taken a shine to Vivienne.
“Let’s think this through,” Jules was saying. The refrigerator doors were flung open, and the nearly empty shelves gleamed under the fluorescent bulbs. “We have plenty of condiments, including two types of mustard and a big thing of fish sauce—I had a Thai cooking craze this fall—and half a bag of semisweet chocolate chips. We’ll want a case of seltzer? And some bagels for the morning, yeah?”
Seltzer, Jules was writing. Then she added bagels, cream cheese, and, after a moment’s pause, tomatoes.
“Jesse doesn’t like raw tomatoes,” Sasha said.
She made herself focus on the words Jules was writing. Her eye caught the word limes, and she forced herself to trace each pen line with her entire soul, trying to lull herself into a stupor.
“Cooked tomatoes are okay, though, right?” Jules was saying. “Like in a tomato sauce?”
Footsteps sounded on the stairs. Sasha’s heart hammered like an old, sad engine. Jesse appeared in an aquamarine hoodie and loose white denim pants. Sasha trembled with desire and sweet sadness. But she stayed where she was. She had to be strong about this. She had to be smart.
“Tomato sauce is fine,” Sasha said.
“Hey,” Jules said, nodding to acknowledge Jesse’s arrival. “Also, what do people like in their coffee?”
“I’m a half-and-half guy,” Jesse said, heaving Vivienne into her arms as though nothing was wrong. She didn’t touch Sasha during the transfer of the dog, just hooked her fingers under Vivienne’s armpits and pulled.
“Would it be okay if we got a thing of oat milk, too?” Miranda said. “Sorry to be a pain.”
Miranda was now turned toward Jesse, still massaging Vivienne’s buttery ears, her thin fingers rubbing precise, dime-sized circles.
“Let’s make sure we get the barista blend,” Jules added.
When Jesse laughed, Miranda said, with the tiniest edge of defensiveness in her voice, “It’s not such a big deal, but the normal oat milk doesn’t mix in very well. The barista blend is creamier.”
Oat milk, Jules wrote. B. blend.
“I added limes, too,” Jules said, transparency important to her. “For the drinks I want to make.”
“What about snacks?” Miranda fretted.
“If they have those Firehook crackers, let’s get them, those are great,” Jules said, writing it down. “With a smear of goat cheese and some quince jelly? Perfect.”
She pressed her fingers into the shape of a b-hole and then kissed the finger bundle before releasing it.
“Nuts, maybe,” Sasha said, but she had long since dissociated. “Chips. Fruit.”
Cara Cara oranges. Quince paste.
“Lou likes fish,” Jesse said, and Jules wrote it down. “They made me this really good tilapia one time. I wonder if they’d make it for us one night.”
Darcy and Lou were aboard the Amtrak; someone would have to go retrieve them shortly.
“What does Darcy eat?” Miranda asked.
Copyright © 2023 by Jenny Fran Davis
